In today's ultra-competitive business environment, demonstrating the return on investment (ROI) of business activities has become more important than ever. In order to justify departmental budgets, managers are coming under ever greater pressure to gather and analyze ROI data from all of their activities.
This has created a challenge for companies that use electronic documents to distribute marketing content. To assess document ROI, companies need technology that can measure the performance of content. Unfortunately, most documents are distributed as standard PDFs, which do not report any data on how effectively content is performing.
Why is demonstrating document ROI important?
Marketers use electronic documents to distribute a wide range of content. There are huge numbers of data sheets, case studies, white papers and other marketing documents circulating freely online. As PDF becomes an ever more important tool, marketers are investing increasing amounts of time and money in producing quality documents.
To produce documents that engage customers and prospects, companies must invest in
- Content creation (research and copywriting)
- Document production (design and layout)
- Online distribution (advertising and syndication)
In recent years, marketing departments have started to come under particularly heavy pressure to account for the ROI of their activities. Unfortunately, using standard PDFs, they are unable to prove that the increasing resources dedicated to creating electronic documents have led to real increases in profits.
How can electronic document ROI calculated?
The example below demonstrates how difficult it is to assess the degree to which electronic documents contribute to businesses success.
A software company, marketing a new product, creates a white paper and allows it to circulate freely online. Readers find the content highly engaging and many share the document with colleagues. This leads to an increase in sales of the product but provides the company with no evidence of the degree to which the white paper has contributed to this increase in sales.
The solution to this problem is the implementation of technology that gathers data on readers and how they engage with content, as demonstrated by the following example.
The software company issues the white paper as an enhanced PDF which uses in-document registration forms to collect the names of everyone who reads the document. This allows the company to show that a significant number of people who view the white paper then go on to buy the company's new software product.
The document also reports data on how much of the white paper readers view and how long they spend on each page – allowing the company to judge which readers are most engaged by the content. This helps the company to demonstrate a link between readers who are particularly engaged by the document and those that go on to buy the product.
Docmetrics: Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Content
Vitrium Systems has designed the docmetrics system to fulfill the need for technology that empowers companies to measure and optimize the ROI of their PDF-based content. To learn more about the web-based docmetrics system and how it can benefit your business, simply click on the link below.
Learn More About Docmetrics
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